New laser sensing technology for self-driving cars, smartphones and 3-D video games

This is a conceptual vision for an integrated 3D camera with multiple pixels using the FMCW laser source. Credit: Behnam Behroozpour

A new twist on 3-D imaging technology could one day enable your self-driving car to spot a child in the street half a block away, let you answer your Smartphone from across the room with a wave of your hand, or play "virtual tennis" on your driveway.

The new system, developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, can remotely sense objects across distances as long as 30 feet, 10 times farther than what could be done with comparable current low-power laser systems. With further development, the technology could be used to make smaller, cheaper 3-D imaging systems that offer exceptional range for potential use in self-driving cars, smartphones and interactive video games like Microsoft's Kinect, all without the need for big, bulky boxes of electronics or optics.

"While meter-level operating distance is adequate for many traditional metrology instruments, the sweet spot for emerging consumer and robotics applications is around 10 meters" or just over 30 feet, says UC Berkeley's Behnam Behroozpour, who will present the team's work at CLEO: 2014, being held June 8-13 in San Jose, California, USA. "This range covers the size of typical living spaces while avoiding excessive power dissipation and possible eye safety concerns."

The new system relies on LIDAR ("light radar"), a 3-D imaging technology that uses light to provide feedback about the world around it. LIDAR systems of this type emit laser light that hits an object, and then can tell how far away that object is by measuring changes in the light frequency that is reflected back. It can be used to help self-driving cars avoid obstacles halfway down the street, or to help video games tell when you are jumping, pumping your fists or swinging a "racket" at an imaginary tennis ball across an imaginary court.

In contrast, current lasers used in high-resolution LIDAR imaging can be large, power-hungry and expensive. Gaming systems require big, bulky boxes of equipment, and you have to stand within a few feet of the system for them to work properly, Behroozpour says. Bulkiness is also a problem for driverless cars such as Google's, which must carry a large 3-D camera on its roof.

The researchers sought to shrink the size and power consumption of the LIDAR systems without compromising their performance in terms of distance.

In their new system, the team used a type of LIDAR called frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) LIDAR, which they felt would ensure their imager had good resolution with lower power consumption, Behroozpour says. This type of system emits "frequency-chirped" laser light (that is, whose frequency is either increasing or decreasing) on an object and then measures changes in the light frequency that is reflected back.

To avoid the drawbacks of size, power and cost, the Berkeley team exploited a class of lasers called MEMS tunable VCSELs. MEMS (micro-electrical-mechanical system) parts are tiny micro-scale machines that, in this case, can help to change the frequency of the laser light for the chirping, while VCSELs (vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers) are a type of inexpensive integrable semiconductor lasers with low power consumption. By using the MEMS device at its resonance—the natural frequency at which the material vibrates—the researchers were able to amplify the system's signal without a great expense of power.

"Generally, increasing the signal amplitude results in increased power dissipation," Behroozpour says. "Our solution avoids this tradeoff, thereby retaining the low power advantage of VCSELs for this application."

The team's next plans include integrating the VCSEL, photonics and electronics into a chip-scale package. Consolidating these parts should open up possibilities for "a host of new applications that have not even been invented yet," Behroozpour says—including the ability to use your hand, Kinect-like, to silence your ringtone from 30 feet away.

More information:
Presentation AW3H.2, titled "Method for Increasing the Operating Distance of MEMS LIDAR beyond Brownian Noise Limitation," will take place Wednesday, June 11 at 4:45 p.m. in the Room 210H of the San Jose Convention Center. www.cleoconference.org/

Related Stories

When it comes to data transmission, light is superior to electronics. An ability to transmit data in parallel by utilizing multiple light wavelengths allows optical fibers to carry more information than electrical cables. ...

In the 1940s, researchers learned how to precisely control the frequency of microwaves, which enabled radio transmission to transition from relatively low-fidelity amplitude modulation (AM) to high-fidelity frequency modulation ...

Making a tabletop particle accelerator just got easier. A new study shows that certain requirements for the lasers used in an emerging type of small-area particle accelerator can be significantly relaxed. Researchers hope ...

(Phys.org) —University of Adelaide physics researchers have developed a new type of laser that will enable exciting new advances in areas as diverse as breath analysis for disease diagnosis and remote sensing of critical ...

For the observation of cold matter in the interstellar medium, astronomers need instruments for the detection of terahertz radiation. Specific high-resolution instruments are based on terahertz quantum-cascade lasers, but ...

Panasonic Corporation today announced it has developed an all-integrated power converter that allows the power switches to be controlled by microwave signals. The world's first microwave-controlled power converter consists ...

Recommended for you

A small team of physicists that includes Jessie Shelton of the University of Illinois and David Curtin of the University of Toronto has written a paper and presented it at this year's American Physical Society meeting outlining ...

Based on complex simulations of quantum chromodynamics performed using the K computer, one of the most powerful computers in the world, the HAL QCD Collaboration, made up of scientists from the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based ...

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have demonstrated, for the first time, a chip-based dual-comb spectrometer in the mid-infrared range, that requires no moving parts and can acquire spectra in less than 2 microseconds. ...

Understanding the microscopic structure of a material is key to understanding how it functions and its functional properties. Advances in fields like materials science have increasingly pushed abilities to determine these ...

Quantum memories are devices that can store quantum information for a later time, which are usually implemented by storing and re-emitting photons with certain quantum states. But often it's difficult to tell whether a memory ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.